Industry Vet Tim McGrath Tapped to Lead Drug Development

Concluding a national search, industry veteran Tim McGrath has been named the new vice president of the Drug Development division at Southern Research.

With over 30 years of general management and global operations experience, McGrath has worked in laboratory and commercial settings, most recently with North Carolina based Q2 Solutions, a Quintiles/Quest Diagnostics joint venture. There he served as the Global Head for the company’s Bioanalytical and Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism and Excretion (ADME) labs responsible for multiple sites in the U.S. and Europe.

In joining Southern Research, McGrath has one primary goal in mind — embracing market opportunities and maximizing scalable growth potential for the division.

“Throughout the course of my career, I have had the fortune of leading several highly scientific teams with the mandate of building world-class scalable operations in GLP [Good Laboratory Practices] regulated environments,” said McGrath. “Southern Research is positioned as well as, if not better than, any other organization I have seen in terms of growth potential. The breadth and depth of their work is truly impressive.”

McGrath’s experiences in management and business development run deep. He started his career in Massachusetts with the Foxboro Company, where he spent 18 years in commercial operations working his way up the ranks to ultimately serve as a global director responsible for project support services for Foxboro’s Distributed Control Systems Division. In 1999, he left the multi-billion dollar company to join Biotage, LLC, a venture backed start up in Charlottesville, Virginia.

At Biotage, McGrath served as vice president of operations where he helped grow the business 12-fold over six years before assisting the company leadership in selling the company to Pyrosequencing AB located in Uppsala, Sweden. Following the sale of Biotage, McGrath joined Ithaca, New York based Advion Biosciences in 2006 as executive vice president of Operations to manage their product and lab divisions.

This move launched the start of a new phase in McGrath’s career — one in which he spent the next decade leveraging his strengths in operations to help expand the size and capabilities of several highly scientific companies, product lines, and research-based teams. Quintiles Transnational then acquired the laboratory business of Advion Biosciences in 2011 – Bioanalytical and ADME Labs – before becoming part of Q2 Solutions in 2015.

“Drug Development at Southern Research is a broad area — our largest division — where we help government and commercial clients develop potential treatments for HIV/AIDS and cancer, as well as Zika, influenza and other infections,” said Art Tipton, Ph.D., president and CEO of Southern Research. “I am enthused by the growth the division has had in recent years, and even more enthused that Tim will be joining our team to lead and accelerate that growth. His incredible track record, and the strategic direction he brings to the team, coupled with our great scientific depth will add up to a very bright future for Southern Research.”

To echo this point, McGrath was quick to explain his thought process on the new role. “My job is to lead a team of brilliant scientists, while creating the optimum collaboration between science and operations in order to deliver world class project execution. Southern Research has rightfully earned a solid reputation in the scientific community, and I cannot be more excited to work with the team to determine where we want to be 5 and 10 years down the road.”

McGrath is married and has three grown sons and one daughter who is in her second year at Georgia State in Atlanta, Georgia. Originally from Massachusetts, he and his wife are huge fans of their beloved Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots.

About the Southern Research Drug Development Division
Southern Research is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit research organization with four key divisions: Engineering; Energy & Environment; Drug Discovery and Drug Development, the largest of the four. The division has broad capabilities in toxicology, and serves as a contract research organization (CRO) with more than fifty years of experience providing preclinical research and testing for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as government agencies. The nationally-accredited, board-certified staff conducts research in facilities that are FDA inspected, AAALAC accredited, and registered with the CDD and USDA for work with Select Agents including Tier 1 agents.